Torn Between Two Highlanders (3 page)

“Of course it worries me,” Conall said, narrowing his eyes. “It should worry you, too, Arabella. After your sister’s disgrace, and now this. You were alone with those men for—”

Davy stepped into the room, tossing back a fiery lock of hair from his eyes. “I thank you for giving shelter to me and my friend, but now that he’s settled, I’m going to have to trouble you again. The Donalds and the MacDonalds don’t behave so brazenly unless they’re planning an attack. The hills are likely crawling with war bands, ready to descend. I can’t leave my friend, so you’ll need to ride to the castle. Tell the laird we’ll return to fight at his side as soon as Malcolm can ride. Meanwhile, you’ll be safer behind castle walls.”

Conall nodded, gravely. “Come, Arabella. We’ll leave at once.”

But just as Arabella started to rise, Davy said, “The lass should stay.”

Arabella blinked.

The warrior continued, “Tell the laird that we rescued his harlot’s sister from—” Davy cut himself off, with a quick look to Arabella, then cleared his throat. “We’ll bring her along when we can.”

“You just said it was safer behind castle walls,” Conall argued.

“Aye, but getting there is the trick. If you’re stopped by enemy warriors, riding together…” Davy didn’t have to spell out what kind of trouble that might mean. That Arabella might be captured and used in front of her betrothed this time. “You’ll have to go without her and get help if you can.”

Conall narrowed his eyes again. “You want me to leave her alone with you—after all she’s been through?”

Davy might have punched Conall in the mouth for the insult to his honor, but instead, he chuckled. “Do you think we tore her from the clutches of those brutes just to do harm to her ourselves?”

Hearing them argue, Arabella announced, “I’m staying.” It was foolish, and maybe prideful, but she was so angry with Conall at the moment, she didn’t want to go anywhere with him. “I’m too tired to ride another mile, and Malcolm needs healing.”

“You’re going with me,” Conall replied, grasping her wrist.

Arabella had enough of being manhandled for one day. For one lifetime. Maybe it was the fact that she was wearing men’s garments that emboldened her, but she yanked her arm back from his grasp. “Don’t tell me what I must do. I’m not your wife yet, Conall.”

“Nor will you be if you disobey me in this,” he snapped back.

She should’ve apologized; she should’ve tried to make things right. Because if Conall believed that she was spoiled now—then other men were likely to think so too. Davy had called her sister a harlot just moments ago. Perhaps if Arabella stayed here with these men, that’s what they would call her too. But for some reason, she just couldn’t bring herself to care.

“Then go on, Conall,” she said, her ire rising, crowding out any more sensible emotion. “Because I can’t rightly envision myself as your bride this market day, or the next one beyond that. And if it means breaking a betrothal, then that’s what it means.”

She should have been sorrier about her broken betrothal, she thought; she should feel
something
, shouldn’t she? But after Conall stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him, Arabella had calmly set about making some willow bark tea for the wounded man. She found a stash of the powder in the cupboard. She’d known it would be there, because she gave this pouch of bark powder to Conall when he complained one day of an ache in his head. He had kept it, which Arabella supposed was a testament to the fact that he may have had some feeling for her; at least before he slammed out the door. But Conall hadn’t used any of the bark powder, which bespoke a lack of trust in her judgment and prescriptions.

“He’ll still ride to the castle and warn the laird, won’t he?” she asked.

Davy nodded. “Oh, we can be sure of that much.”

“How?”

Davy stooped beside her, warming his hands by the fire. “Because he’s a coward, lass, and because there’s likely a war coming, he’ll want strong castle walls to hide behind.”

“A
coward
,” she huffed, wondering if she ought to defend the man she’d just broken with. “You’re a bit keen to jump to conclusions when you’ve only just met the man.”

“I heard what he said to you. Wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, mind you. But it’s a small cottage. I heard him tell you how you must wait and worry over whether the villagers think you’re a ruined woman.”

A lump rose to Arabella’s throat. “I suppose they
will
think I’m ruined.”

“They might,” Davy said, softly. Then, meeting her eyes, he added, “But if you were my betrothed, I’d take you for my wife straight away and tell you not to worry. Because the moment any man said the slightest thing about it, even by implication, I’d give him a pounding he’d never forget. And the next time he said your name, he’d be saying it without any teeth.”

Arabella thrilled. Was it the threat of certain violence that stirred her blood? No. She’d already seen this man fight for her. It was, she thought, the fact that Davy would tell her not to worry; that he thought to defend more than her honor and her life, but her sanity too. And she suddenly thought him a very rare kind of man. At least until he added, “Not that I’m the sort to take a wife.”

“Why not?” Arabella asked, surprising herself.

“That’s a mighty personal question, isn’t it, lass?”

She blushed, but not as deeply as she might have before this day. “You raised the subject. And given what you witnessed today—knowing that you’ve seen me without my clothes—I feel as if you know quite a bit about me personally…and yet I know nothing of you at all.”

“Well, I won’t pretend I didn’t see what I saw, lass. But I didn’t enjoy it, if that’s your worry.” Arabella frowned. Davy noticed. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it. I would certainly enjoy seeing you without your clothes, but I didn’t think it
right
to let myself enjoy it.”

Arabella continued to frown.

He ran a hand through his coppery hair. “I’m making a mess of this. You don’t want to hear whether or not a man might enjoy seeing you undressed right now; of course you don’t. Not after today. You just want to feel as if you’re not the only one with a patch of skin exposed.”

Arabella exhaled. “Yes.”

Davy smiled, with a slight twinkle in his eyes. “I’ll answer yer question. Truth is, I like whores too much to settle for a steady woman. And in the second place, I had the mumps when I was a wee lad.”

“The mumps?” she asked, utterly confused.

He nodded, smile fading. “No point in marrying unless you can make a family.”

The
mumps
. Suddenly it made a bit more sense. She’d known the disease sometimes robbed people of the ability to make children. “But you can’t be
sure
that you can’t have bairns—”

“I’m fairly certain of it. I’ve had my way with plenty of lasses—on account of my aforementioned irresistible dimples—but never one of them got big with child.”

He said this brazenly, as if he didn’t care, but she noticed that his eyes slid away at the end. And she guessed it bothered him very much.

Arabella cleared her throat. “But there may be some herb…something that might help. Some remedy—”

“
Aha
,” Davy said, pointing a finger. “So you
are
a witch.”

She blinked. “I’m only speaking about herbs and their medicinal properties. Whatever you think I did to those men in the clearing…it wasn’t witchcraft.” Would they burn her more readily for poisoning men or for practicing witchcraft? The latter, she decided. Definitely the latter. “It was the stew they made me cook. I put berries in it—toxic ones.”

“So you brewed up a deadly potion…still sounds like witchcraft to me, lass.”

She stiffened, insisting. “I’m
not
a witch!”

Davy sighed dejectedly. “That’s a shame, if true. You see, I’m pinning all my hopes on your being a witch. Because I fear it will take nothing short of magic to bring Malcolm through this night alive…”

She was surprised by the emotion in his voice. “Is he a very close friend?”

“Very,” Davy said, his eyes misting a bit as he spoke. “Close as brothers, we are. Truly. Not that I’ve ever said as much to him. And suppose he doesn’t wake up… then I never will have the chance to say it, ye ken.”

He needed her to heal his friend; to rouse Malcolm from his stupor. She wished she knew how. “I’ll do all I can for him,” Arabella promised. “But you mustn’t keep saying that I’m a witch. If such talk got back to the laird, he’d have me burned alive.”

At that, Davy snorted. “You don’t know our laird well, I see. Because trust me when I say that if John Macrae knew he had a witch in our clan, he’d never burn you. He’d want you at the castle using your witchcraft to defeat our enemies. Our laird is a practical man, and so am I. So if you must smash up eye of newt or speak in tongues or make bargains with the devil to make Malcolm well, then you do it. Because I’d rather lose my soul than let him die.”

~~~

Lorna
.

The wounded warrior moaned this name when Arabella tried to rouse him to sip at the bark tea. But he didn’t wake to drink it. He only whispered again, and again, through chattering teeth.
Lorna. Lorna. Lorna.

“His wife,” Davy explained, and Arabella’s heart squeezed with grief at the thought Malcolm might die calling so pitifully for a woman who couldn’t hear him.

“Is she nearby?” she asked, wondering if they might risk trying to fetch her.

“She’s dead.”

Oh
. That made Arabella even sadder.

Davy checked his friend’s bandage to find that Malcolm was still bleeding—bright red blood was seeping through his bandages faster than they could change them. And Arabella worried that the bark tea would not help that; in fact, it might make it worse. Having lost so much blood, Malcolm was very cold. His skin chilled and clammy. But Davy piled atop him all the blankets they could find, then said, “I think we have to sew it closed.”

“His wound?” Arabella asked, mildly horrified.

“Aye. I’ve seen it done on a battlefield.”

“Just sew together rent flesh like a torn garment?” She didn’t know whether the idea filled her more with nausea or curiosity. But she wasn’t going to let a man bleed his life away if she could help it. “I’ll look for a needle and thread.”

At her father’s cottage, Arabella would’ve known where to look. Her sister Heather always kept the sewing items in a basket by the hearth. Thankfully Conall kept some thread in the bottom of his trunk; he must have used it for mending, a job that would have certainly been hers if she had married him. Which confirmed again that she wasn’t so very sorry to have broken off the betrothal after all.

Davy frowned at the delicate needle. “Can you thread it for me? My fingers aren’t so nimble.”

She did as he asked, then stood by the side of the bed, watching curiously as the freckled warrior prepared to sew up the wound. But the moment she saw the angle at which Davy held the needle, she protested. “Should you really be jamming it into him like a spear?”

“I’ve never sewed a stitch before today,” Davy said, swaying a bit as if his knees were spongy at the thought of what he meant to do.

“I’ll do it,” Arabella said, surprising herself.

Davy eyed her, warily. “I can’t have you swooning away at the feel of piercing human flesh.”

Arabella reached for the needle, defiantly. “You look more like to swoon away than me. Besides, our clan motto is
with fortitude
, isn’t it?”

At that Davy let her take the needle and thread, watched her knot the end. He swallowed audibly when she pushed the sharp end deep enough into Malcolm’s skin to hold, but not so deeply as to penetrate the muscle. It took only three stitches before the pain brought Malcolm awake, and he cursed, thrashing.

“Keep still, Malcolm.” Davy wrestled his friend still so that Arabella could finish her grisly task. “Unless you mean to bleed to death.”

Meanwhile, Arabella sewed swiftly, making tight, clean stitches. Or as neat as she could make them anyway. Malcolm stopped struggling somewhere in the midst of the stitching, lapsing from consciousness again, which made it easier for Arabella to do her work. And while it was a sickly feeling to experience a needle sink into living flesh, she ignored it. She ignored the blood. The gore. The fact that she saw parts of Malcolm—deeply impressive parts—below the waist she ought not to have.

All she knew in that moment was this man’s pain and her need to heal him. And when she’d washed up and Davy went to fetch firewood, she lay down beside the wounded man on his straw mattress in utter exhaustion, telling herself she meant only to keep him warm.

In spite of the scar on his cheek, Malcolm was, she thought, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Stern, dark, stony. But beautiful somehow, in a savage way. And like a savage creature, he seemed to sense her there. His eyelashes fluttered open, and he murmured, “Lorna?”

“No,” Arabella said, softly.

But he seemed not to hear her, reaching to stroke her hair with a longing tenderness, trying to turn as if to take her into his arms. “Lorna.”

She pressed one palm to his broad chest to fend him off. “Please don’t move or you’ll open your wound again. I’m not Lorna. I’m just a girl you tried to save today…”

He stopped stroking her hair, and blinked glassy eyes. “You looked like my wife. In the firelight.” Then Malcolm let his head fall back upon the pillow, poised to drift off again.

Arabella thought it might be better to keep him awake. “You must have loved her very much.”

“Aye.” Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to want to say more than that.

To keep him talking, and because she was painfully curious, she asked, “Do you mind—would you care to say—how—how did she die?”

Malcolm didn’t answer for a very long time. So long, in fact, she believed he had fallen again into a deadly slumber. But when he spoke, it was like a curse. “Donald clan warriors took her, years ago.”

Arabella startled. Was he confused or was it possible that his wife had also been kidnapped? She hated the Donalds for it—making her twice as glad that she’d poisoned the lot of them. “They killed her?”